


Hairbrush

by Pappillon



Category: Steven Universe - Fandom
Genre: F/F, Hashtag: depressing., White Diamond's Turgid Party Corpse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-31
Updated: 2017-05-31
Packaged: 2018-11-07 02:44:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11049660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pappillon/pseuds/Pappillon
Summary: Yellow brushes White Diamond's hair.





	Hairbrush

Yellow Diamond hadn’t stopped typing all day. From the moment she arrived in her office, her fingers hadn’t left her screen, nor her keypad. If she ever rested, it was only to read another message taken from her wealth of never-ending mission reports. They stretched on and on in columns, each bold and glowing. The symbols that composed their titles blurred into meaningless lines and corners, rife with the usual typos and odd punctuation. Looking at them all, Yellow’s eyes dried in the nonstop light, and just as she finished one and opened another, an incoming call from Blue Diamond overtook her machine. Yellow answered immediately.

“Blue, what is it?” Despite the image of the other empress’s face taking up an ample amount of space, Yellow drew out more and continued working, the sound of her clacking a constant addition to the conversation.

“Yellow, I need to run an errand. Can you tend to White today?”

The golden woman stopped typing immediately and shot the other Diamond with her full attention. “I don’t have time to ‘tend to White.’ Furthermore, why can’t White tend to herself? She has Pearls, doesn’t she? What in the world would _I_ need to go for?”

“Yellow, _please. It’s your turn_. You haven’t gone to visit her in ages.”

“I don’t see why I should go at all. I have enough responsibilities and baby-sitting a Diamond who’s perfectly capable of taking care of herself shouldn’t be one of them.”

Blue placed her hand over her face and exhaled from deep inside her chest while Yellow’s typing continued.

“Please, Yellow. You don’t have to visit for that long. Just go and talk to her for a short while. Maybe you could brush her hair. She seems to like that.”

Yellow buried her face in her palms and drug them across her features, as if running a rake through dirt. “Fine. I’ll go. It’s not as though I had a thousand other things to do today.”

Before Blue could respond, Yellow hung up and closed all of her screens, leaving both her Pearl and her control room.    

The door to White Diamond’s chambers had developed some rust where both sides came apart, and the button that would call her attention had faded around the edges with its light having grown dim. An arm crossed behind her back, Yellow pressed it inward as far as it would go until her glove crinkled and complained.

Even from the inside, the sound echoed, but for many long seconds, nothing came of the ring aside from a surrounding silence and the impatient adjustment of Yellow’s boots. Just as she reached out to press it again, the doors banged open with a kind of desperation—they moved far too quickly and loudly, as if awoken with a jolt.

Yellow looked immediately to one of White’s many Pearls, who stood quivering while presenting a salute. The perfectly round gem upon her forehead shone iridescent colors even within the dim lights of the chamber, and despite chewing up the side of her cheek in temptation, she did not speak.

“Is she lying in her room?”

The Pearl nodded and Yellow Diamond needed no more before following the path to White’s innermost chamber. She walked along a series of old rugs that had faded over the millennia, where both Diamonds and Pearls had set their feet and trampled out the pattern and color. Now most of the rugs and even the art reflected back an unpleasant grey from both age and unrestrained dust.   

The further Yellow traveled, the older the relics became, until she reached the eldest of them, lying in a room rife with ancient tomes that littered the floor, as well as a malfunctioning screen that hovered open before her. It displayed a series of images and words that flashed across her face. The picture of an old mission report blurred and scrambled before coming back together every few seconds, and despite the fact that Yellow stood directly behind it and well within White’s line of sight, the ancient empress didn’t move to greet the other Diamond. Her half-lidded eyes didn’t even bother blinking.

Upon closer inspection, they had developed a crust around the edges, as had her plump and cracked lips.  

“White?” Yellow’s tone emerged sharply. “ _Have you died?_ ”

Almost as if answering, the empress’s body filled with a breath. Her form expanded around the boundaries of her still beautiful clothes, as if she had collapsed in a drug-filled stupor after a soiree and never bothered getting back up. Despite this brief reaction, however, her attention never strayed from the message. Her breath merely occurred a little more loudly, as if something had blocked either her nasal passage or throat.

“Blue asked me to come check on you. I’m not sure why, but she told me to brush your hair, and probably clean some of the spittle from your mouth.”

White made a slow blink as her screen flashed. Upon her vanity well across the room, Yellow caught the sight of a hair brush, its bristles bursting with one enormous snow-colored hair ball. With measured steps, she stepped over the books and the bent and crinkled papers, only to rip the old strands out and toss them onto the scrambled floor where they nearly disappeared within the dust.

White’s normally wild hair had grown severely tangled, like angry vines overtaking a wall, but if they also possessed several dead leaves that had never escaped. Staring into White’s long and ruined locks, she found a time-consuming puzzle to solve, but sat upon the eldest empress’s mattress anyway with a hard sigh. Her well-kept brows bunched into knots.

The sudden additional weight shifted her around, but White Diamond only managed to create a gasp.

“Why don’t you have your Pearls do this for you? As if Blue and I don’t have enough to contend with.” Yellow sank the bristles in near White’s scalp and attempted to draw them through, but like wheels stuck in a muddy trench, they hardly budged. Her lungs exhaled violently before she continued speaking, “Are you really going to lay here like this for the rest of eternity?” Instead of taking the brush from the tangles, Yellow attempted to push them through and made little progress. She could practically hear a few hairs ripping from White’s scalp. “Are you even listening to me?”

White didn’t respond and Yellow tore her way through, becoming stuck again closer to the ends. “How does your hair even get this bad, White?” Her words escaped just as she forced the last of the knots through the old bristles of the brush, only to start over a few centimeters away. “I wonder if you don’t roll around on that pillow on purpose. How else would it possibly get this way? This is absolutely absurd.”

Yellow tore her way through another section.

“Forget the Pearls doing it—you could do this by yourself if you would only get up. How long would it take you to walk to your vanity, sit down, and brush your hair? I suppose even a few seconds are just too much for you.” Yellow began tugging her way through the next strands, pushing with both hands to the end of the point, as though she were scrubbing a stubborn patch of floor. The same sounds occurred again, the ripping, along with the faint noise of strings breaking, but Yellow continued. “How did you conquer all of those planets so many millennia ago with no one to brush your hair for you? No wonder you’re so exhausted. It must have been _impossible._ Nothing like managing the same empire with one Diamond who won’t stop crying and another one who won’t even move. How _did_ you endure?” Yellow grunted as she forced through and ended up removing entire strands. “ _This is damned ridiculous_ ,” her precise fingers cleaned out the brush again and threw the balled up, tangled waste onto the floor.

But as she turned back to White, she found the other Diamond with tears in her eyes and an uneven breath wracking her lungs. Those silver eyes still couldn’t meet her gold, and the reaction happened almost in physicality alone. She still didn’t turn from the screen while her body began to sob, nor did she cover her face to hide its ugly bends or the unpleasant shape of her open mouth. Even her weeping barely included the use of her voice, and came out on several unsteady heaves and choking gasps.  

Yellow remained still and watched a few moments too long, until finally setting the brush upon the bed and releasing a long sigh from the very base of her stomach. Her arms remained lowered with a new sort of heaviness and a numb tingling at the tips of each finger. Her brows dropped about as low as her heart, which had sunk well into a pit of acid and butterflies.

“White, look at me.”

The eldest continued to cry, and the bags beneath Yellow’s eyes grew infinitely vaster.

“White.”

Her words didn’t come through.

Yellow emptied out her lungs again and placed her hands upon White’s face. She moved gently and took the tears, as well as some of the crust from her eyes. “I’m sorry.”

The oldest Diamond cried a little harder and Yellow stroked a few fingers past freshly brushed hair.

“It’s been hard without you.” She closed her hand around a collection of locks as if holding a bouquet of flowers and moved it to the end until her fingers balled up into a loose fist. “You need to stop moping like this. It’s killing both of us.” She started over again and wove her digits in.

Predictably, White didn’t respond, but her breathing did grow softer and her weeping ceased. Yellow’s hand had created a consistent rhythm and a soothing sound with the way her fingers drifted through her hair, and eventually, White closed her eyes, never having turned to look at Yellow.

Keeping her hand moving, the golden woman reached her other arm over to turn off the screen and a kind of heaviness took the most of Yellow as soon as it went quiet. There was only the sound of White’s soft inhaling and exhaling, and of the makeshift comb against her straightened hair.

Eventually, Yellow laid down herself, taking up a space behind White. She wrapped her arms around the other empress and held her close as they released air in unison.

“I can’t stay for long,” she shut her lashes.

And in the silence surrounding their quiet breathing, White touched one of Yellow’s hands and slid their fingers together.                                

 

 


End file.
